Affiliate Marketing – for some of you, this might be only something you’ve heard of but never fully understood, while for others, you’ve experienced how incredibly powerful this world of performance-based online marketing can be when scaling a business faster than few can imagine.
There are countless nuances in this massive marketing machine, but overall the simplest definition can be boiled down to someone else advertising your product or service, and you paying them a commission for each sale. Affiliates range from dedicated website traffic specialists to publishers and influencers, all the way to your competitors you want to collaborate with. Whether you’ve never used affiliates to promote your business or you are well versed in this powerhouse promotional tactic, this is aimed at helping you see what the biggest opportunities with affiliate marketing are right now.
I caught up with some of the keynote speakers from Affiliate World Europe just ahead of one of their flagship gatherings happening in Barcelona on July 8-9th. The event will host over 3,000 of the industry’s top professionals and boasts a list of some of the best speakers on the planet. Here is what 7 of these industry rockstars had to say about what you need to know to fully unleash the power of affiliate marketing in 2019.
Zack Franklin
CEO, AMZKungfu Inc
Companies like Amazon and Uber grew to their behemoth status by heavily utilizing affiliates for early and continued growth, so it simply cannot be ignored as a monumental growth strategy. Working with affiliates is one of the best ways to grow fast without much risk or additional employees. Sign up as an affiliate for your competitors and see how they’re structuring their programs, what commission they’re offering, and how they manage their affiliates. Or – take affiliate landing pages and programs from one vertical and apply them to another.
James Van Elswyk
CoFounder, Purple Ad Labs
Affiliate marketing is crowdsourcing the best digital salespeople in the world to explode your brand. Marketing is a “brain job” and, by outsourcing the heavy lifting to affiliates, you gather the creativity, intelligence, and grit of a massive, globally distributed workforce as opposed to the geographic, financial, and operational limitations of an internal team.
Chad Wilton
Head of Content and Strategic Partnerships – Affiliate World
More and more, we’re seeing companies break into the scene and put brick and mortars out of business. Direct to Consumer models have never been stronger, and many of them have leveraged performance marketing to help accelerate their growth and compete with global brands. With limited funds, you only pay for results, so the risk is inexistent for advertisers and brands.
Dee Dang
CEO, Right Hook Digital
Winning the affiliate marketing game in 2019 is all about robust fundamentals (aligning your offer and messaging with the people behind the numbers, having a testing mindset, etc) and staying on top of the tactics that are working right now. The market is moving so quickly – get complacent and you’ll get left behind!
Earnest Epps
Founder, High Ticket eCom Secrets
Consumers are becoming far savvier, and so jockeying for their attention is becoming more competitive daily. You can’t expect to have an immense amount of success with cold traffic and direct response marketing on the first go with your ads. You really need to focus on warming up and connecting with your audience before you start to see big results
Eric Dyck
CEO, iStack Training
With rising traffic prices, it’s never been more important to own your audience. Build networks of the content and syndicate them across multiple platforms to grab the ear and the attention of your audience. Build a list not just of emails but of messengers subs, SMS, and even home address. This way, you can reach your audience again and again for a lower cost than if you had to buy their attention each time from a traffic platform.
Oliver Kenyon
CoFounder, Landing Page Guys
2019 is fast becoming the year of building sustainable assets. There has been a large shift from short-term campaigns and quick-burn landing pages to building branded assets and authority sites that create trust and longevity through dedicated audiences and secondary monetization methods. Regardless of the vertical, whether nutra, finance, gaming, or anything in between, affiliates are leveraging the changing landscape of traffic sources and consumer intent to improve results and campaign lifespan.
The affiliate marketing industry is going through countless changes and upgrades, and right now is an incredibly exciting time to be tapped into the industry because opportunities to bring tremendous growth to your business are countless.
I’m really excited to watch all of these incredible speakers share some game-changing advice in Barcelona, and hopefully, I’ll see you there too!
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